Low population realms and progression.

So, I recently returned to WoW after a month and a half break, I was raid leading and tanking and my group made fairly solid progression given our hours and realm to draw from. Progression being, we cleared normal modes and a couple heroics in MOP, nothing to fancy but on my realm, which could be anyone of a bloated number of medium/low population realms, we could have been doing much worse. So I return, and my raid group had replaced me with my blessings, since I didn't know how long I would be out. They had also, hit a brick wall on progression and seemed to have lost any motivation to improve, with that I made the choice to move along and find new scenery. Having been a group I had spent multiple tiers in WoW with, its not the easiest of choices. So, I was looking around at various guilds, and a common theme I noticed was, everyone had 6 or 7 committed players, out of those 6 or 7, 1 or 2 was a liability on mechanics. So that meant each raid had 5 or 6 players who were capable, and this was the story with a good, 10 plus guilds I had spoke to. Then I began to talk to some of them about maybe merging, and was met with the same issue everywhere, they can join us. I know a number of guild mergers don't work, egos in WoW are massive, and it seems worse in smaller guilds, when a few players are decent/good and are big fish in very small ponds. So probably a good 3 weeks had passed since I first started looking around, and had given up and just pugged and used openraid.us. Out of all those guilds, only one managed to find a full raid group and they have barely cleared any content. A few of them had left the realm together, and a number had splintered off into other guilds or players had just vanished and nobody knew. Then these same guys who refuse to bend or budge would be in trade chat talking about, how dead the realm was, and I can only imagine that had any of them attempted to work together and put aside, "THEIR" guild, they would have found so much more enjoyment in the game. Talking to a few real life friends who have kinda been stranded on their "dying" realms by nostalgia, they agreed that if the guilds on their realms quit competing for the same small group of players and instead simply merged/worked together something, some progression might be accomplished. No real point to this other then, a common theme I had noticed upon returning to WoW, and while server merges would be nice in theory for those of us on low/medium population servers, its unlikely in the near future, and thus there is a lot more that the player base can attempt to do before QQ to Blizzard to fix a problem.